Posted
by
kdawson
on Monday February 01, 2010 @07:58PM
from the trend-is-your-friend dept.

An anonymous reader points out that the latest Net Applications numbers show that MSIE 8 has become the world's most-used browser, taking over from IE6, which has been hit by the decline in the use of Windows XP. PCMag.com emphasizes another angle on the numbers, which is that Chrome is the fastest-growing browser. Firefox's market share has stalled just below 25%. Chrome is now in third place, ahead of Safari. The Guardian's article reminds: "There's no guarantee that NetApps' numbers are accurate, and they are very unlikely to be correct to two decimal places. However, they do appear to be a good indicator of market trends."

With so many people still using IE, whatever holes there are in firefox and chrome just won't get the same attention from the hackers. That alone makes me not want to use it. Obscurity may not be obscurity but it's also not jumping up and down with a target painted on your chest.

And you should also realize that there are many organizations that still are stuck with IE6.

I'm working on a web-based application and the clients accessing it are more then 70% IE6, 23% IE 7 and 3% IE8. The remaining are the other browsers. But this application I work with is not placing demands on which web browser to use, it only takes statistics of the user agent and is designed to be W3C compliant through the HTML Validator.

And it's also easy to see that there are still clients out there running Windows 2000 and Pre-SP2 Windows XP. (information that is provided through the user agent string).

And you should also realize that there are many organizations that still are stuck with IE6.

Well we're stuck with Gopher !

IE6 is now 10 years old. It predates Windows XP. The Windows XP which will be retired in July (or at least which ought to cease receiving support).So granted there also are orgs that are stuck with VT120s but that doesn't mean anyone has to support them.

If some people really want to develop in-house stuff using terminals or IE6, why not, but excuse us while the world moves forward. It just doesn't make sense any more to support those specifically any more (except that a termina

Something that bugged me throughout the whole China-Google-IE6 fiasco... Why were Google etc. using IE6 internally and got hacked? MS released IE7 with sandboxing in Vista and Windows 7... and Google's internal IT saved lots of money by sticking with IE6, but then turn around and blame MS for IE6 when MS itself recommends upgrading. Did I miss something or did Google PR and astroturfing successfully prevented this point from being made in any of the articles or Slashdot comments?

Did I miss something or did Google PR and astroturfing successfully prevented this point from being made in any of the articles or Slashdot comments?

Or the far simpler explanation that no one simply happened to think of it. No conspiracy theory required.

Furthermore, I can think of at least one good reason for Google to still use IE6 internally, and that is testing. Granted, one would hope they were taking precautions to make sure they didn't get attacked because of it, but the fact remains that it was pretty reasonable for them to keep a couple of IE6 machines around for testing their services.

It's also a pain to use. It BSODs on boot in KVM, you have to first boot it in another hypervisor, run mergeide, and then it'll run normally. Plus they expire every few months, so you get to do it all over again. Ultimately easier to just fly to bird to IE users.

To add to this point... Like this summary states, up until recently, IE6 was the most common browser... like it or not, you've gotta make sure the *majority* of your visitors get the right look and feel.

That being said... Please for the love of God help everyone you can get off of IE6 and onto (literally) anything else.

The best that I can figure is that GOOGLE itself was NOT HACKED. Just the accounts of people using Google services were hacked. Those people were external. But because newspeople are clueless about technology they equate "wah, my google account got hacked" with "Google got hacked". You are right; outside of some simple virtual machines for testing their code changes against IE6 nobody at Google uses IE6.

IE8 sucks. It particularly sucks on XP, but in general, in a slow, bloated pile of garbage. I've given up any hope that Microsoft has any capacity to build a browser that isn't pure unadulterated shit.

"Legacy bullshit" is Microsoft's stock in trade. That's what they are. Windows is the win32 API; IE is IE6-style HTML. That's the core of their business, why it's so hard to get rid of them. Lots of people would like to be rid of Windows and move onto a platform that's less of an attack vector, but nearly everyone has some shitty old application somewhere that they can't do without and Windows provides a good upgrade path, or at least better than anyone else. IE may be a shitty browser but it works on a lot of shitty intranet sites that were designed for IE6 and that nobody can afford to fix now, and probably won't be fixed for a decade at least.

If they decided to pull an Apple and just say "screw you, everyone who built stuff for the old API, you're dead to us," they'd be torn apart by the market as a thousand little competitors jumped in and tried to get in on everyone who'd been left behind. (Apple only gets away with it because they're small enough, and cater mostly to home users with shallow pockets, that nobody really caters to the people who get screwed by the Steve Jobs Upgrade Treadmill.)

It's Microsoft's blessing and the key to their success, but it's also their curse and will probably be their eventual downfall. They can toss billions of dollars around and try to get the greatest programmers in the world, but they're always going to be hampered by the thing they can't (or are unwilling) to change -- the legacy cruft that gives them real vendor lock-in, or at least a huge advantage over all comers.

So what? If porn sites bothered to have malware targeting Ubuntu, a porn addict could easily get an Ubuntu PC loaded up with it. No amount of OS security is a defense against the user being stupid enough to fall for "you need this program to get $thing_you_want!"

That's hardly proof of anything without some context. All I can see from the screenshot is that there are a shit-ton of toolbars. Whether this person deliberately installed them (intentionally or to make FF look bad), they were installed as part of some third-party program (optionally or otherwise) or they are the result of some sort of malware infection(s) isn't clear.

In fact, a lot of the toolbars strike me as horribly suspicious to be anything related to malware. Google Toolbar, Netcraft, Facebook?

The reason I remember that engine is that, for ~1 year in 1999-2000, I had an Macintosh (bought it used, the new ones were horribly expensive here).
Well, my knee-jerk reaction was to use Netscape. But the machine ran OS 7.5 and had mere 16MB RAM, and Netscape was - really - slow and unstable (the usual result of software crashes in Macs, back then, was system reset).

Then I tried MSIE "Microsoft - yuck" for Mac. Well, not only it rendered the pages beatifully (it even did a perfect dithering job in order to simulate 24bit colors in a 15bit display), not only it was much faster but it was really stable.
That was the day I realised "man, there _are_ talented people working in Microsoft".

Also strange, it's the fact it was better than contemporary Windows' MSIE. For a couple of years I was puzzled why was that so, until I learned about the fact it used a different engine.

A lot of folks don't remember it, or choose not to, but Internet Explorer 5 was once the best browser you could get and 6 was better still. The period between netscape 4.9 and a functional Mozilla build(let alone the rise of firefox among the great unwashed) was a long and dark one though, and Microsoft got complacent and let it rot.

To reinterpret, the proprietary, nonstandard, internet breaking MS engine may soon be a minority operator leaving developers to concentrate on the majority of browsers that do comply with the civilized standards. This may be very bad news for MS, if, combined with HTML 5, it allows application front ends (read google docs, games, tax software) that is independent of an OS. Google is embracing this OS independence. Apple is embracing this OS independence(OS X for iPhone, OS X for Mac). What is MS going to

If you think Chrome is becoming popular now, just wait until Chrome OS is finally available on netbooks. Chrome's usage will literally shoot through the roof. It will rise from its current 8% up towards 45% to 50%.

Everybody is underestimating the market penetration of netbooks right now. They're going to go critical within the next two years, and Chrome OS will be there to bring Chrome to the masses.

I have used it for months, but I am quickly becoming agitated with its bugs. I have had multiple occasions where the entire browser becomes unresponsive (which was supposed to be extremely uncommon with each tab as a process).

Flash absolutely destroys the browser after a few hours of listening to last.fm, and if I leave the browser on overnight, I regularly return to a browser that I can watch as it refreshes the screen line by line (literally, I could count the lines as it repaints the screen).

With Firefox's latest improvements, I am very eager to see what they can dish out in 3.7, and I am slowly working my way back to using their browser.

I also hate how Google "helps" by hiding a large portion of modestly large URLs when I highlight the link.

Google won me with speed, but, as usual with everything except search and GMail, they are losing me with bugs and a lack of features (Print Preview, the ability to remove typos from my search history (like "sl," which gets very annoying now when I type sl and it googles it instead of selecting Slashdot, and internal settings, like automatically signing into corporate intranets, while on the intranet--Firefox and IE support this).

...and with the lack of features, the memory footprint isn't that much better than FF or Opera. Chrome is tricky though, every time you open a tab, Chrome creates a new process, so if you're not paying attention, it looks like Chrome has a smaller footprint than the other two.

Google won me with speed, but, as usual with everything except search and GMail, they are losing me with bugs and a lack of features (Print Preview, the ability to remove typos from my search history

I agree with you. I switched to Chrome as my main browser for similar reasons. I used to use Firefox, but I became weary of how slow Firefox is relative to Chrome, even without extension. With extensions it's a joke. (Side note: I like the userscript extension method in the Chrome Beta - which is very stable for a Beta).

But why, as you say, can't they have a half intelligent search history, like Firefox? Why does the browser constantly chatter to 1e100.net? image [tinypic.com] If this is a Google server, why doesn't it LOOK like a Google server? Why doesn't a Google search for "Chrome plugins" have as a result the proper Extensions page? https://chrome.google.com/extensions [google.com]. In fact, why is that page the SECOND result for "Chrome extensions"?

I'm using Chrome under Linux x86-64.
While I like Firefox (well, "Iceweasel"), Chrome runs way faster and it's not performance-held by a single core like Firefox is.

About stability, Chrome crashed (and by "crashed" I mean the whole browser) only once in ~45 days, and my machine runs 24h with the browser always running with lots of tabs active.
Sometimes the Adobe Flash plugin crashes (and when it does, all tabs are affected), but in all cases a page reload solved that.

I'm using it on my netbook, desktop and work. The main problem I have with it is the lack of proper bookmark management. I only have two or three bookmarks I need to access, but I don't want to waste the screen space of a full bookmarks bar to use them. Thoughts/Ideas? Leaving the bookmark manager open seems like a bit of a kludge. I wish it would open bookmarks in a new tab when clicked on from the bookmark manager.

The results show that we've got pretty heavy diversity of browsers. We now have four browsers with ranges in the 12% to 24% of market share (although why they made the graph with those as the numbers easy to track isn't clear to me). This means that any single exploit that is browser specific isn't going to harm more than a fraction of all users. Just as genetic diversity helps prevent epidemics from sweeping through and wiping out a species, browser diversity does the same thing. The real upshot is not the rise of IE 8 but that we have more than 2 serious browser choices that are being chosen by people who aren't just the types who read Slashdot. That also means that a lot of people are making real choices about their browser types, possibly indicating that the general public is more aware about browswer issues than they were about a decade ago. On the other hand, another way of looking at this data is that around 40% of people are still using some form of IE. So all of those people have what is essentially their default browser. It might be interesting to compare this over longer term, but the data in the article only goes back a year.

Competition is a good thing, no doubt about it. I'm a solid Firefox user but I'm happy to see Chrome or even Opera (or even IE for that matter) make significant advances in browser technology because I want to see that push Mozilla to further improve Firefox too.I think having browser diversity helps to keep web designers honest as well - hopefully gone (or at least numbered) are the days when sites would only work with one particular browser. I'm pleased to see that I rarely have to use IE Tab anymore in

...I could really care less who fights for what place. The bigger impact being made by the browser wars is we finally see more than one damn browser on the list, forcing many websites to adopt to user choice rather than the IE "my way or the highway" web hole we dealt with for many years.

The bigger impact being made by the browser wars is we finally see more than one damn browser on the list, forcing many websites to adopt to user choice rather than the IE "my way or the highway" web hole we dealt with for many years.

Unfortunately, this has turned into the IE & Firefox "my way or the highway".

Literally NO ONE that I know uses Internet Explorer. If it's a computer that I set up for someone else I install Firefox AND Chrome and explain to them the values of IE, FF, and Ch, and months later I'm still seeing them using Firefox.

Ok I take that back. Some of my coworkers (and myself I suppose) use IE for some Cisco and HP devices that have clunky web interfaces. But those browsing sessions don't get registered on these kinds of reports and certainly don't add up to 40%.

Everybody where I work outside engineering uses IE. At the most firefox might be kind of a perversion they might dabble with one day if they want IT to know they are a rebel. I am sure that most big workplaces with big, professional IT departments will only use IE.

Many corporations insist on IE only. Why? Becuase so many 3rd party applications use the IE engine, that you have to keep it patched and maintained anyway. Allowing additional browsers, that create little-to-no value for the company, is just and added expense and bad practice. (remember, software is supposed to fullfil a NEED, not a preference)
The "IE is vulnerable" arguement holds no water, because if the IT Security team is doing their job, such exploits can usually be blocked through various securi

Exactly right. Add in to that the fact that neither Chrome nor Firefox are very friendly to corporate software distribution and patching systems and that neither works with established systems like Group Policy and folks at major corporations using Windows don't want to touch it. I use FF at work and Chrome and FF at home, but I have admin rights on my work machine since I build images and write code. Most folks in the company don't have admin and just have IE with the corporate policies applied for securit

Old people, non-geeks, spouses of slashdotters maybe. Seriously, a lot of people still use IE. There are reason though. I was able to "convert" my wife from IE to FF a few months ago, however, her company's payroll system only works on IE. Once she switches it on, she continues using it. That to me is a big problem with FF. We as geeks just don't go to crazy ass sites as other regular people sometimes and we think FF is the best whereas, there are still a number of sites that don't work well with IE. I remember flashblock extension screwed up videos on a number of sites for me for a long time.
Also, FF has its own issues. I typically have to restart my browser every other day because it makes my system slow and I am already using Adblock and Flashblock to cut off the junk and the memory leak from flash.
The biggest advantage of Chrome is its popularity due to Google and perceived speed. It feels like Chrome loads pages wayyy faster FF. However, in many instances, it succeeds in loading only half the page fast, there are elements of the page that load slowly and if you note down the start to end loading time, it is comparable to FF. However, since it loads a visible portion quickly, people believe it is wayy faster than FF.

I believe the majority of that statistic is the result of corporate computer deployments where IE is pretty much the norm, and employees are unable to install their own browsers. That's why IE6 was at the top for so very long, even through the entirety of IE7's lifetime, because corporations hadn't taken the time to install new software like that en masse.

I'm glad to see that IE8 is on top now, though(*). Shows that corporations are perhaps finally realizing how utterly bad IE6 is and they're moving forward.

(*): this is not an endorsement of IE... I honestly can't stand it... just anything is better than IE6.

I do a lot of IT support for school. EVERYONE uses Internet Explorer. Students don't know any better, teachers don't know any better, admin don't know any better. I don't know if it's mandated as such, but it's what people go for straight away when they need to use the Internet. Doesn't matter that I put a Mozilla Firefox icon on the desktop of all machines either (which is nice for me and anyone else who knows what it is).

Literally NO ONE that I know uses Internet Explorer... Ok I take that back. Some of my coworkers (and myself I suppose) use IE for some Cisco and HP devices that have clunky web interfaces.

You sound like a professional, so the pool of people you know is probably a bit skewed. I'm a biologist, literally no one I know is a creationist. Sadly they are many out there lurking in dark places, conspiring to ban evolution from the classroom and replace it with a bible.

I remember posting about this about a year ago or so on/., and now I see the trend continue.

I run a website about the Heroes of Might and Magic game series (very little "geek bias"), in Poland and for Polish-speaking audience. It's relatively popular, about 1500 unique visitors a day, first hit for "Heroes of Might and Magic" in a localized Google search, thrid for "heroes" only after a Wikipedia disambiguation page for the term and the page on that goddamned TV series. The statistics are so completely different that it looks almost as if it were a parallel universe or something:

January 2008:53.58% - Firefox31.19% - IE13.83% - Opera

January 2009:60.99% - Firefox23.99% - IE12.32% - Opera2.10% - Chrome

January 2010:60.33% - Firefox16.12% - Opera15.29% - IE6.24% - Chrome

Data gathered by Google Analytics, active on just about every non-static page on the server. It gets even more interesting in a month-by-month comparison on a graph, some of the fluctuations clearly correlate with new releases of FF, Opera, Chrome, *and* IE, but I'm afraid that I don't have the time right now to prepare something you could see and decide yourself.

98.27% Windows. 70.82 of that is XP, 17.25% is Vista, 10.77% Win 7, then 2000, Server 2003 and 98, all three in sub-percentages.

1.21% Linux0.24% "not set"0.21% Mac

In addition: 9 people (sub-promile amount) on an iPhone, 8 on Symbian, 5 on an iPod (WTF?...), 2 on an Android, 2 on some WebTVs or something.

Might be gaming bias, non-Windows gamers are rare in general. HoMM games mostly work on Wine, and there was a native Linux port of HoMM3 (without add-ons and incomatible with Windows versions in online play,

I wouldn't be so sure about this. A majority of my users are really "casuals", not HoMM nerds. There's a group of about 60 of those, with 20-30 visiting on any given day, and the rest are mostly kids who just bought HoMM5 at an electronics store because the box was shiny enough, or adults with jobs and families who fire up the good, ol' HoMM I, II or III once a month or so for an hour to bring back the memories of college all-nighters.

A news site would probably be better for a non-biased sample, but I consi

I wouldn't be so sure about this. A majority of my users are really "casuals", not HoMM nerds.

A 'casual' HoMM nerd is... still a nerd, no matter how you slice it. An adult nerd who played HoMM as a college student is still a nerd. That's just the way it goes. It's not an insult, just an observation. Embrace the nerdiness!

And I have a bunch of random observations. Nothing so coherent that I'd call it a review, but still relevant here.

So far, I've been really pleased. It's very fast compared to Firefox.

Unfortunately, almost all of my Firefox plugins are geared towards privacy and security. I can't run any of them on Chrome, so I am only willing to use Chrome to browse a small subset of the websites I'm willing to browse with Firefox. Slashdot happens to be among those.

Strangely, now that I no longer browse Slashdot with Firefox, Firefox behaves significantly better than it has been. Apparently, one of the absolute worst sites for the overall performance of Firefox is this one.

I routinely keep at least 30 or 40 tabs of state in Firefox.

Incognito in Chrome also looks like a much more convenient (and in some ways better) privacy feature than anything I currently use on Firefox. Though I still really wish I had Ghostery and NoScript.

Chrome does have some features that are almost as nice as Firebug built into it.

I really wish Firefox would just go multi-threaded, get a much better Javascript rendering engine and lose the horrible memory leaks. Last time I had to shut down Firefox it had a VSS of nearly 4G!

Strangely, now that I no longer browse Slashdot with Firefox, Firefox behaves significantly better than it has been. Apparently, one of the absolute worst sites for the overall performance of Firefox is this one.

Do a validation test on this page. I just got: 104 Errors, 2 warning(s)

IMO there is no need for them with a good HTTP proxy like Privoxy [privoxy.org]. Add a bit of Incognito use and a good user.action file, and all is great. I made my own user.action file ages ago from the MVPs.org hosts file [mvps.org], and ever since the world has been good. It's here [rapidshare.de] if you are interested.

To spoof this information? Could you have a bank of servers trolling the net giving unique browser identification information on each unique page hit, there by giving the impression that a browser is more popular than it really is.

For example why are firefox 3 and firefox 3.5 being treated as two different browsers. They are both Firefox version 3If we were to add those to statistics Firefox 3 would have roughly the same share as internet explorer 8.0 that is 22.30%

Version numbering is affecting the statistics here, MS doesn't use the same philosophy as Firefox when it comes to versioning.MS never had internet explorer 6.5...but it had internet explorer sp1 and sp2...which are as different from each other as firefox 3 and firefox 3.5. Yet internet explorer 6.0 is displayed as one browser.

Once IE 8 receives a sp or a major update should its statistics be split to ie 8 with sp and ie 8 without sp

How different two versions of the same browser have to be different to justify the splitting of their statistics.

Just to complete the picture after using the same Data presented in the article and summing up all internet explorers and all firfoxes we getie first column firefox the second chrome third and others fourth

The point of suggesting an upgrade is that IE 6 won't be included in it. That's pretty much the ONLY way to be certain the user doesn't do something like... well... NOT upgrade.

And since suggesting going to Vista would be foolish, 7 it is.

Of the "power users" as you say that I know, more than half use a pre-installed OS. You must not know ANY Mac users. Even as a "power user" that built my own machine the last four iterations, I have a laptop (which came with an OS preinstalled) and several work comp

Personally, I think auto-update needs to go die in a fire. I don't want a program dialing home, downloading a file, and then bitching at me to install it (or even going ahead an installing it on its own). FFS, even Windows Update doesn't do that if you tell it not to.

However, what *does* need to happen is someone should make a small program that can check what version of a program you're running, and what the latest version is, and let you know if you can update. Ideally, the program would allow you to list